The author spent his life working with media.

He naturally thinks in images

In metaphors in fact – visually, as well as in poetical words. The image and its metaphors may reveal meanings hidden to rational thought. Triscel is a multimedia complex of visions and inferences rather than explanations.

The first portal is a Song Cycle – performance verse with music and effects – presented as a filmed video, full of colours and symbols. The worldwide web presents this unique opportunity to a poet to be seen presenting his own verses in the manner he or she thinks most characteristic. There are also sound-only options, for instance for in-car or private listening, and texts with background notes.

Dafydd sees this performance as springing from deep below conscious weighing and judging. Coming, then, to a second portal, he finds himself startled by what he wrote down and expressed about his mother in the Marwnad - through the first portal. He saw her as his motherland, as an embodiment of Wales and her bright visions. Now he seeks dreams and inferences (Manley Hopkins’ “inscapes”) which were not obvious to him then - even a whole life-setting, an integrated landscape for living worthy of his kind upbringing and heritage. New births … He explores the threefold, the maternal triscel, further, first by digital renderings of his settings - a sort of digital painting and graphic art - and from his reactions to them, and here he uses other new symbols to reinforce and amplify discoveries suggested in the Marwnad verses.

Through the third following portal, the creator of the verses and digital images (they are not photographs but renderings) looks again at what he has expressed, examining and interpreting the meaning of Wales the Motherland through his mother, his childhood mother town Gloucester, and then his “Alma Mater” Oxford University and Balliol College. The further cruel cradling of an accidentally-caused disaster leads him to other sorts of motherhoods - the influence of a kind woman psychiatrist, and the Mater et Magistra - Mother Church. Finally and at last he finds his own parenthood in his fuller family and a home valley, and he recognises that he is (as a male) not just set on fathering but mothering too. Tenderness is seen as the astonishing basal reality of the cosmos, of all that is. He uses verse – formal, free, and syllabic - and many forms of prose to find suitable means for family story-telling.

So he uses recollections to analyse the happenings of a lifetime, and writes by focussing on addressing his family present and future. These often light-hearted but sometimes tragic musings appear in a hyperbook - with links to letters and short stories. Calling other writings “ocean ventures” he says what he made of the happenings in his very eventful life. Further poems and images arise within this group of writings.

No one is of course expected to read all these, one by one, randomly or otherwise. As a digital work with hyperlinks, the whole point is to give the reader a creative choice - an individual way of using and assimilating what is in the trilogy of the three “portals”. At the end, both of the book and of his own life, these reflections lead him to articulate what he sees as a rational and merciful philosophy for living fully.

Above same text

hyper-linked

to the actual

Three Portals

On site and Online